The Preschool Chef: Cooking with Young Children

Y ou've heard it before: Cooking with your kids is the best way to teach principles of good nutrition and encourage healthy eating habits for life. Studies show that children are more likely to try new foods (read: vegetables) when they have a hand in prepping them. And you know, too, that as little folks are exposed to new ingredients, they're expanding their stock of acceptable foods, setting them on a path to be "good eaters" for life.

But did you also know that cooking gives preschoolers an early grounding in science, math, language, art, and even reading? The kitchen offers abundant lessons in basic chemistry—discovering how certain ingredients combine, react, and change as they cook —as well as arithmetic, since ingredient lists are nothing if not a study in amounts and fractions. Getting your young one to describe what she sees, tastes, and feels feeds her vocabulary, and exposing kids to food's myriad colors and textures provides them with a whole new creative palette —and palate. Plus, reading through a recipe with your child helps him learn how to follow words from left to right, while beginning to distinguish numbers from letters. And fine-motor skills are enhanced when little fingers tear, stir, and pour.

No matter how you slice it, you can't lose by getting kids cooking as soon as they can stand at the counter. So what's stopping most parents? According to Mollie Katzen, early kids' cooking pioneer and author of just-for-kids cookbooks Pretend Soup, Salad People, and Honest Pretzels (though you might recognize her from The Moosewood Cookbook), many folks underestimate how much young children can actually do in the kitchen. This was true of Katzen, once upon a time, until she arrived at her son's nursery school early one day. The class was making applesauce together. "My son didn't even look up when I walked in. I'd never seen a group of children so industrious and engaged," she recounts. Each child was cutting an apple slice with a plastic knife and adding it to an electric skillet, which the teacher (and Katzen's future Pretend Soup collaborator, Ann Henderson) had placed on a child-size table. The kids were even taking turns (very carefully) stirring the hot pot. "They really rose to the task," Katzen says. "I could see little lightbulbs going off everywhere, and you could just sense the pride of accomplishment."